Majority of scientific papers are currently available online. This article, by Dr. Lokman I. Meho, provides a historical background of citation analysis, impact factor, new citation data sources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, MathSciNet, ScienceDirect, SciFinder Scholar, Scitation/SPIN, and SPIRES-HEP), as well as h-index, g-index, and a-index. According to the author, publishing a journal article is only the first step in disseminating or communicating one's work, the Web provides several methods and tools to publicise its scholarly worth. Dr. Meho is Assistant Professor at School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University.

Publishers are under increasing pressure to make journal papers free to all by abolishing subscriptions and making authors pay a fee instead. In this article, Rüdiger Voss welcomes the benefits that "open access" publishing brings, while John Enderby warns that this new publishing model comes at a price. According to Enderby, researchers have the option to publish elsewhere if they do not like a particular journal. But if all journals were open access, consumers will loose their influence over the market, and funding agencies would have the upper hand to decide how much of their resources would go to publication costs. Rüdiger Voss is a senior researcher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. John Enderby is immediate past president of the Institute of Physics and a paid adviser to its publishing arm.

In this paper James V. Maher, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh, presents a closer analysis of the university and difficulties of scholarly publishing in today's world. According to Maher, scholarly publishing is one area in which the future of Research University is really threatened.

This article by Peter Hirtle describes an analysis done concerning various forms of addenda that enable authors to retain some rights in their works, provided the addendum is acceptable to the publisher of the journal in which the author's work will be published. Peter B. Hirtle is the Technology Strategist for the Cornell University Library's Public Services and Assessment unit, the Intellectual Property Officer for the Library, and the bibliographer for United States and General History. He is a Fellow and Past President of the Society of American Archivists and chairs its Working Group on Intellectual Property. He is currently a member of the Copyright Office's Section 108 Study Group and a contributing author to the LibraryLaw.com blog.

Over the years, there has been a rapid change in the ways scientists share and use research. Many limitations of the recent past, on research and learning, have now been being swept away by the Internet. This article by Richard K. Johnson is one of a series of commentaries on the future of scientific publishing. Johnson was the founding Executive Director of Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a position he held from 1998 to 2005. Currently he is a scholarly communications consultant and senior advisor to SPARC.